More on Keyboard use and winter … again!

12Feb

It has been four days now that I have used the keyboard on our daily CW practice sessions. I am finding it to be a good experience in general and I do enjoy having a Morse “Footprint” sans all of that eee stuff followed by repeats. If the goal of practice is to improve copying ability and move upward with another live human being and not just a canned program from say, ARRL code practice, than this seems to be the method to accomplish those goals. Let me be clear here. I can do just fine sending manually up to about 30 wpm. Then my coordination or lack of musical ability gets involved and my error rates skyrocket. These statements apply to send side only-receive is fine upwards of 35 wpm and I attribute that limit of 35 wpm level to a lack of sending ability holding me back. I have been through this long enough (at least a year) at the same speeds to know I have hit a physical/mental wall that may never be pierced. In any event, confronting ones imperfection is not always fun but there it is.

This morning I called CQ on 30 Meters on the eights (10108 in this case) and had a wonderful QSO with Ron KB3AAY from close to Baltimore MD. Ron is a CW fan and used a K3 and was using a paddle at about 17 wpm when we first began. He then switched over to an AEA keyboard and we went at it for almost 20 minutes. We were fortunate that we had a good path between us this morning and copy was excellent. I was pleased to see that I could copy his keyboard at speed and so that question has been answered. The question of course was do I need manual hand sent CW with lots of fills to be able to copy what I thought was 30 wpm or faster. Or can I copy true 30-35 wpm with machine code. The answer is no problem with the machine code at 35 wpm. Great. I don’t mean to prattle on about small details but this is the sort of thing you ask yourself while battling limits and finding work arounds to the limits that present themselves while acquiring a new skill.

Winter is still with us today. It looks as though school will start late if at all and rightly so. Who in their right mind wants to be on the road with snow and Texan drivers? Ill attach another pix here so you can see what happened since yesterdays picture. This snow is wet and heavy.